PinkRabbit is a multimedia email system released in the late 90s in Japan. It allowed mixing of text and animations into emails via emails dispatched via standard POP and SMTP connections, albeit with a proprietary "TransMediaLetter" or "tml" format.

The TransMediaLetter format was shared with several similar programs, all cross-compatible, and all produced by COLABO Inc. for various clients. Compatible clients include DreamFlyer for the Sega Dreamcast and Windows, FINAL FANTASY VIII Mail for Windows, Trihoo Mail for Windows, Kumomail for Windows and Macintosh, and several others.

Later versions of PinkRabbit than v1.18 were released, with the final version, v1.42, landing in 2005, and removing the program's usual expiry date. This version does not appear to have been archived anywhere obvious, so v1.18 is the latest version known to still exist. v1.18 is subject to an expiry date, locking out the user if the system date is January 1, 2004 or later. Additionally, these versions are considered "sample" versions, with a full version originally available behind a free account registration. With the "sample" designation comes a 31-day trial period before being prompted to download a newer copy, regardless of whether it's 2004 yet. Registration is of course no longer available, with the service and website ultimately being discontinued by COLABO in 2008.

Copies of this version of PinkRabbit were retrieved from the CD provided with the book 「PinkRabbitで作る　かわいい　メール」 ("Cute email made with PinkRabbit") by Takamatsu Yoshiaki (ISBN4-88399-064-8, published by Subarusya). A Redump rip of that CD is also available on the Internet Archive. An ISO is provided here as PinkRabbit.iso, as this includes the main installers for both Windows and Macintosh, as well as some supplemental materials.

PinkRabbit comes in two flavours, CUTiE and Classic. The differences are entirely down to the graphics used by the GUI and the included stationery. Additional skins and stationery were also originally downloadable from an online service.

The installers on Windows are 16-bit executables, which may prove difficult to use on modern systems despite PinkRabbit running just fine on current versions, so pinkrabbit.classic.zip and pinkrabbit.cutie.zip are provided as an alternate installation method for such systems; its contents are a folder which is installed by default into C:\Program Files. Both will require Windows with pre-Unicode Japanese support enabled, or Wine with the LC_ALL set to ja_JP.

For Macintosh, copies of the StuffIt self-extracting archive installers, straight from the CD, are included as pinkrabbit.classic.ppc.sea.bin and pinkrabbit.cutie.ppc.sea.bin. These are for classic Macintosh systems, so an emulated copy of OS 9 or earlier, or a period machine are likely necessary. It's not currently known whether it runs in the Classic environment on early versions of Mac OS X. Note that the Macintosh version requires an additional installation step, namely dragging the default.tma file onto the PinkRabbit ppc application to install the included resources. The Windows version does this automatically as part of the setup process.

Much like DreamFlyer for PC, the lockout function looks up the program's expiry date from a string within the executable, so defeating this lockout is fairly straightforward. These sample versions, however, include an additional time limit function. With the help of Ninji, we were able to defeat that lockout as well, restoring them to working order.

On Macintosh, the expiry date is stored in the application's data fork at offset 0xefb05 as an ASCII string, and the time limit is defined by another ASCII string at 0xefd1f. Both lockouts are defeated by setting the expiry to a far-future date, and filling putting null bytes into the time limit string. A pre-patched copy of the application is included in BinHex format as PinkRabbit ppc.patched.bin, and executables for both CUTiE and Classic are identical.

For the Windows version, the expiry date is stored in srabbit.exe at offset 0x900fa as a UTF-16 string, and the time limit is defined by another UTF-16 string at 0x90182. Both lockouts are bypassed by setting the expiry date to a far-future date, and putting null bytes into the time limit string. A pre-patched copy of the executable is included as srabbit.patched.exe, and executables for both CUTiE and Classic are identical.

Much as with DreamFlyer for PC, the patched executables extend the time limit to the year 9999, but future travellers may wish to take it further.

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